The BBC may not be here in 15 years

Can the BBC survive as a national institution commanding widespread respect? And in an age of media behemoths such as Netflix, will the relatively small Corporation become irrelevant?

These are questions which anyone who feels affection for the BBC, as I do despite everything, is bound to ask. To say Auntie has an existential crisis is no exaggeration.

One gigantic problem — which I don't apologise for mentioning again — is political bias. It is getting worse, almost certainly because of the divisions over Brexit, to which most BBC journalists are viscerally opposed.

The Corporation has long been left-of-centre, as franker employees such as presenter Andrew Marr and former director-general Mark Thompson have admitted. But more than ever, it resembles a metropolitan sect increasingly out of touch with much of the country.

Can the BBC survive as a national institution commanding widespread respect, asks Stephen Glover

There have been three very recent examples of the BBC displaying blatant bias. The first came after The Sun newspaper discovered that the young Jeremy Corbyn met a Czech spy on at least three occasions in the Eighties when the Cold War was at its height.

That the meetings took place is not in doubt since they are documented in a Czech archive. None of the papers which carried the story accused the Labour leader of spying. There were simply questions hanging in the air.

But our national broadcaster — with an audience far greater than the readership of all newspapers — didn't ask them. Four days passed before it even acknowledged there was a story involving the young Corbyn.

Why didn't the BBC investigate such important allegations? I suggest a mixture of fear and sympathy. Many at the BBC believe Corbyn may be on the verge of power, and they don't want a fight with Labour.

More than that, Corbyn is popular at Broadcasting House, doubtless partly because he is increasingly anti-Brexit. This is a complete turnaround from the days after his election as leader in 2015, when the BBC treated him as a nincompoop.

Let's apply what Auntie rather pompously terms a 'reality check'. If it emerged that the young Theresa May had met a member of the far-right National Front three times 30 years ago, would the BBC have ignored the story? You know the answer.

A similar combination of fear and covert support surely explains the Corporation's indulgent treatment of Jeremy Corbyn after his change of mind about the customs union — which he previously strongly opposed — earlier this week.

Like any politician he is entitled to change his opinion, but we can be certain that if the Prime Minister had undertaken such a clumsy U-turn, she would have been hauled across the coals by the BBC.

Yet Corbyn's contradictions were barely examined. For example, his contention that Britain could remain part of the customs union and negotiate its own free trade deals outside the EU — definitely not true — passed virtually unchallenged.

Isn't this bad journalism? I can't believe that even at the anti-Brexit, pro-Corbyn BBC there aren't some decent journalists who are ashamed of giving the Labour leader a free ride.

The third example of bias came yesterday after the Mail revealed how Max Mosley supported the revoltingly racist far-Right in the early Sixties, and apparently concealed this fact when successfully suing the now defunct News of the World in 2008 for describing his orgy as Nazi-themed.

You'd have thought this was meat and drink for the Beeb, especially after Channel Four News brilliantly eviscerated Mosley. But for several hours it was shtum. When Labour announced it wouldn't be accepting more money from Mosley, the BBC carried a brief story on its website, but still ignored it on its news